The Lotus House (12 page)

It had been a relief to get away from Cairo, which
Margot thought hideous, noisy and full of beggars, but it seemed there was no more to be seen before Luxor, which would take five days to reach, during which time there was nothing to do but sit about on the deck watching the long endless river banks slip slowly by and eat the rather unappetizing food which apparently, nostalgically trying to ape the menus of a Victorian schoolroom, consisted of too much meat, too few vegetables, and milk puddings. “Don’t touch the salads,” warned Miss Benson, the experienced BBC producer who sat at their table.

The English-speaking party consisted of Dimity and her married sister and husband — the sister, Holly, was slightly larger and both wore enormous pale-rimmed spectacles which made them look like a pair of starved owls. There were, besides, an elderly retired Civil Servant closely resembling Alec Guinness, with a small waspish French wife, two knowledgeable school teachers, Crispin and his wife Prue. The rest of the tourists were Germans and Dutch who kept to themselves.

The weather was excessively hot, unusually so they were assured. The slow motion of the boat, the unvarying light and landscape, produced in Margot a sense of unreality as if she were viewing, or even herself part of, a monotonous film, and Crispin, who should have brought everything to life, was proving the second and more insidious disappointment. He had behaved as she had expected, the affair between them had developed as she had intended, but their love-making seemed disconcertingly irrelevant, as if he too were a degree removed from reality.

Then there was Prue — Margot had been disconcerted at first that Crispin, who had assured her that he could find someone to take Andrew’s place to keep Prue amused, had apparently not bothered to do this, but she soon concluded that it had not really been necessary. Prue not only accepted the situation but seemed relieved by it.
“I bore him, you know, and it is so important for him not to be bored.” Dimity took Prue under her wing and soon knew more about both her and Crispin than Margot had ever known or cared to know.

“She sure comes from one of your real old families, the kind that don’t appreciate Art unless it’s ancient and hung in their galleries, and they didn’t care for her to take up with it. But she had money of her own and she quit, and she and he were studying together in London — but you sure know all this, Margot. Well, don’t you agree it’s a shame she’s given it all up? She was doing fine, just loved painting flower pieces, I bet they were real pretty; he said so too, he said they were cute. That ought to obligate her to continue, shouldn’t it? Because he must know. She could do some pretty views right now, I tell her.”

What
pretty
views?
thought Margot drearily.
Shaggy
banana
trees
with
bananas
growing
the
wrong
way
up,
repetitive
palm
trees
and
flat
green
strips
of
land
backed
by
the
ever-lasting
sand.

Prue didn’t talk, she generally had a book for company. “It’s too hot even to read, I think,” said Margot. “What have you got there?”

“Nothing that matters,” said Prue hastily.

“Prue enjoys Edwardian fiction,” remarked Crispin. He made it sound like an addiction to dominoes. She was often inclined to be vague and unpunctual. “I can’t think why you can’t wear a watch like other people,” said Crispin.

There was something in the way Prue used to look at him and the tone of his voice when he spoke to her that seemed familiar to Margot, but the train of thought was somehow distasteful and she did not pursue it. Her relationship with Crispin became less and less satisfactory. Her meetings with him in London had been accompanied by good food and drink, and generally diversified
with some entertainment to follow, but now she found long stretches of talk with him more and more wearying. There was a central point in their conversation from which everything radiated and to which everything returned, and this was Crispin Keylock and not Margot Royce. She felt herself growing less charming and less charmed, and at length Crispin appeared to feel this too, for he turned more and more to others of their party and especially to Boone Cleveland, Dimity’s brother-in-law. Boone was impressed to learn that Crispin Keylock was an avant-garde sculptor who had held successful exhibitions in London and Paris and whose portrait busts were beginning to be sought after.

“Tell me, Mr Keylock,” he said one evening, “how can an ordinary guy like me get to appreciate what fellows like you are getting at? I just would like to support you but I want to know what I’m paying my money for.”

Quick on the scent, Crispin braced himself to reply in his most professional vein.

“For myself,” he said, “I feel I perform, as it were, a holding operation between the concept and the media. Don’t you agree it is the job, to put it no higher, of ‘fellows like myself’, as you say, to establish the insightful on both points? Conceptually, you see, the public — if I may include you under that umbrella? but you have placed yourself there —”

“I sure did,” agreed Boone Cleveland.

“Well, as you say, quite naturally and honestly, you do need us to mediate; after all, that’s what the words imply when all’s said and done.”

Boone nodded.

“You have abstract emotion on the one hand,” said Crispin warming up, “totally unacceptable, wouldn’t you say? And yet utterly indispensable, and the ritual forms of aesthetic experience, including — one must absolutely these days strike out for the all-inclusive — the
Royal Academy for instance.”

Boone clutched at the Royal Academy.

“A fine show,” he said, “Holly and I visited it last time we were over.”

“Well yes, the all-inclusive, as I was saying,” continued Crispin, “and that does of course include both the Royal Academy and the public urinal via that vital participant, the
individual.
That’s where portraiture comes in, so often a chat show these days as you must have noticed. But in my work, Mr Cleveland, I do see myself actually as an interviewer in what I consider as the great straight tradition on the box.”

Boone Cleveland was visibly impressed, though not much elucidated.

“I’d sure like to see some of your work, Mr Keylock,” he said.

“I think my wife has some photos with her somewhere,” said Crispin, “if you really would care to look at them.”

The photographs were produced. Clipped to one of them was a laudatory review of an exhibition.

“Oh yes,” said Crispin casually, “I’d forgotten that was there, unaccountably the critics this time did seem to see what I was after.”

“Read it out, Boone,” said Dimity, peering at the prints. “It’s gotta help!”

Boone Cleveland read: “‘Crispin Keylock conveys the ominously indicative with a rare blend of nonchalance and holistic expertise suggesting that here at least we have an acceptable equivalent of Nouveau Beaujolais which has a lotta bottle and may well stand the test of time, specially in ‘Portrait of a Taxpayer’ and ‘Mood No. twenty-one’. Eclecticism is by no means a pejorative phrase in the right hands. His skilful use of polystyrene and titanium to convey overtones of despair are especially successful.’”

“Well,” exclaimed Dimity after a little pause, “isn’t that fine!”

“Which is the Taxpayer, have you got one of him?” asked Holly.

“Yes,” said Crispin, “you’ve got him there.”

“Doesn’t look too good to go to bed with,” said Holly, “all that wire.”

“Now, Holly!” reproved her husband. “We must have you over in the States, Mr Keylock,” he continued, “I think I can promise you you’ll be appreciated there, and I’d be proud to help you all I can.”

“You know, I’ve a good mind to take him up on that,” said Crispin to Margot afterwards, “it might not be at all a bad thing.”

Margot agreed, but Andrew’s dismissal of Crispin as “not a serious artist” recurred to her as his remarks often had a habit of doing, however irritating at the time. What was a serious artist anyway? Well, Boone Cleveland was willing to back Crispin, obviously differing from Andrew, and he was certainly beginning to make a name for himself, which was good for her art gallery, she supposed.

At last the boat reached Luxor and they disembarked and went by donkey carriages to the Temple of Karnak. Here Margot’s sense of unreality intensified — the vast columns and statues diminished her almost to vanishing point. Awe invaded her like a dark cloud, blotting out all familiarities. She recovered a little at Tutankhamun’s tomb, which was smaller and less impressive than she had expected, and where the garish paintings partially dispelled the awe. But the expeditions during the days that followed were filled with inexorable ruins. The Germans and Americans, bristling with notebooks and cameras, asked endless questions of the incomprehensible Egyptian guides, and the dark steps, the subterranean tombs, affected Margot like a miasma. Before they reached Aswan she became ill. It was easy
enough, Miss Benson had said, to pick up a bug, as everything unmentionable went into the river. She had bouts of sickness and diarrhoea. Cardboard figures of Crispin, Prue and Dimity hovered about her. Crispin brought a huge bunch of scarlet objects pretending to be flowers from which she tried to hide. She slept most of the time with a recurring nightmare that she saw herself at Karnak again, a minute figure running down an unending passage between the monotonous columns. Far away in front of her was a patch of mirage brightness, in the centre of which she seemed to glimpse the quivering image of a house — of the Lotus House — but she knew she would never reach it, and the pitch of horror came when she was forced to watch the tiny figure disintegrate into nothingness.

After two days the attack wore off and she struggled out very early in the morning to catch a breath of coolness and lay hidden in a corner on the deck. She had fallen half asleep again when the sound of her own name woke her immediately. She recognised the voices of the Civil Servant and his wife.

“I wonder how that pretty Mrs Royce is doing. They say she has been quite unwell. She should have a husband here to look after her.”

“In more ways than one,” said his wife.

“You mean that posturing sculptor fellow — yes, that’s a pity, and there’s the little wife too.”

“You distress yourself unnecessarily, chérie — the wife was swallowed up long ago, she no longer exists, and as for the beautiful lady and the artist, that will not last long, they are too much of the same portmanteau, two beans in a row, how do you say it?”

“I say ‘peas in a pod’, my dear; but how do you make
that
out?”

“Both are
tout
à
fait
égoistes
.”

The voices faded away as they moved off, leaving
Margot surprised by the intensity of the anger that possessed her. She was not in the least like Crispin — the woman was a fool, not worth thinking about. But she continued to think about her furiously. It became absolutely necessary to refute her, and now she found herself unaccountably arguing the case with Andrew.

“All right, I give it to you about Crispin, but you must see that Frenchwoman’s quite, quite wrong. I’m
always
aware of other people, you say too much so,
he’s
only aware of himself, and look how he treats Prue.” Suddenly the half-recognized familiarity in Crispin’s tone as he spoke to his wife, and of her answering look, thrust itself once more into her consciousness — this time with greater clarity and she did not like the revelation at all. “That’s utterly different,” she said. But now the sun had crept round to her corner and she went back to her cabin.

They were nearing Aswan and it seemed hotter than ever, but at Aswan the cruise would be over. “My next holiday abroad will be among snow mountains,” decided Margot. “Switzerland, I think, the cleanest and tidiest place I know.”

At Aswan everybody else went to see more ruins in a felucca, but Margot drove through sandy poverty-stricken streets to a grotesquely grand hotel, where they were to spend the night and where, with a totally unexpected eagerness, she hoped to find some mail.

“I daresay you won’t want letters and I daresay I shan’t write,” Andrew had said, “but you’d better leave an address in case.” There was a letter but she saw with disappointment that it was addressed in Harriet’s unformed script.

“Dear Margot,” she read, “I can cook, Andrew says I do sossages and bacon very well. We put all the things back in the wrong places. Andrew says when the cat’s away the mice do play. We went to a consert. Love and kisses, Harriet. P.T.O.” Margot turned the page quickly,
but there was only the briefest of postscripts. “Greetings, my serpent of old Nile, Harriet’s fine. Andrew.”

“Why does he call me a serpent?” said Margot, angry to find her eyes filling with tears of disappointment and self-pity, “The weakness still from that horrid attack, I suppose.” She read Harriet’s letter again, really, it was hardly worth sending. “He might at least have seen that she spelt it properly.” But there was a new note in it quite unlike any letter she had had from Harriet before.
I
hope
the
child’s
not
being
a
bore,
she thought,
it
sounds
rather
as
if
she
is
.

Andrew, however, was not at all bored. Letty Sanderson thought the trouble he was taking over Harriet showed true kindness. Margot would have supposed him to be carrying out some kind of psychological experiment in his usual detached manner. It was neither of these. He was actually and unexpectedly simply enjoying himself, he was discovering the pleasure of communication. It was necessary to explain and to comment to Harriet on many things, which to him had become merely commonplaces, and this gave them fresh value. After Harriet had gone to bed, he sometimes found himself ruminating, not about her but about himself. He knew himself, both in temperament and experience, to be lacking in the practice of communication, he had not hitherto felt the need, in fact he considered it hazardous. The lunchtime concert he had taken Harriet to was in an eighteenth-century church. “It isn’t a bit like a church,” she had said. She was right, thought Andrew, it was too calm, too lucid, prayer here would be irrelevant, in a building that accomplished perfection by exclusion. Was it an analogy of his own aims and ideas? Hitherto he had gone his own way, with a fair amount of good humour admittedly — but that was just the luck of his genes. You couldn’t go your way so completely with a child however, and though it was only for so short a time, the commitment necessary was a new
experience. He was conditioned by training to pay attention to fresh phenomena and examined his reactions with interest. They were mixed — he saw with apprehension cracks appearing in his carefully constructed attitudes, but the cracks undeniably let in new light. After which musings he would play a little Bach and take himself off to bed. One evening he gave his parents a ring, realizing he had not made contact with them for months. They seemed pleased, if surprised, and he arranged for a meeting in the near future.